To live with discipline

So, here I am on day 99 of my challenge and I am back to the beginning. After two months of struggling to keep going with both weight loss and writing any posts due to eating birthday bakes and very high levels of stress at work, I have started in earnest again this week.

My husband and I have, this week, been, to paraphrase Jane Eyre, ‘thrust on to a [new] tack’ and are now working to succeed in our aim. Tim has started a new job, which means we suddenly have evenings and weekends opened up to us to visit the gym together and to properly and wisely plan our meals for the week.

I have designed us (well, me really but company and support always help) a star chart, which include my exercise plans for the week and the number of calories consumed each day. One star is bronze for me and silver for Tim and two stars in one day is gold. A full week of gold stars earns us a full English breakfast for Sunday lunch and, as before, a stone of weight loss earns me non-food treats. I intend for most of these to be related to my feet so, for example, for the stone that I lost before I rewarded myself with a new pair of running shoes, with thanks to my parents-in-law, which were sorely needed and have already made a huge difference.

Alongside my weight loss goals for the year, I have also set myself physical fitness challenges, culminating in and building up to completing the Royal Parks Half Marathon on 13^th October with Tim and his parents. In order to successfully achieve this goal, it will be imperative that I stick to my exercise plan, which will also add an extra incentive. This is a huge challenge for me and Tim as it will be more than twice what we have ever run before. 

You may also notice that there are now two additional fields in the data at the bottom of my posts. This will document total calories consumed and total calories burnt through exercise during the week (Sunday to Friday), to add another layer to the environment of accountability and clarity that I am attempting to build around myself.

However, though extreme stress at work and the season of family birthday celebrations have both lapsed for the time being, it is evident that I need a better defense mechanism against these obstacles to my self-control than I have so far managed to develop.

One of these methods, as my Mum very helpfully articulated in a talk she recently did at my home church, will be worship. She (and I, though to a much lesser extent so far) has real and extensive experience that worship is a surefire way to bring hope into seemingly dark situations, reaffirming your knowledge of the truth and, therefore, alleviating the associated stress and preventing the need to seek unhealthy comfort.

An aspect of the challenge that has now changed is that Tim is doing it with me, which will help hugely; he will be an additional person to be accountable to in a very personal way, he will be coming with me to the gym every week day and he will be thinking along the same lines as me when it comes to planning meals. The fact that we are both doing this challenge together, even though I have much further to go, will help us both stay on track and ‘recover the correct course’.

So, from now on I resolve that there will be no further increases in my weight until I have completed my challenge (it can stay the same for a week, but not increase at all). I also resolve to give up all added sugar, except on isolated, very special occasions, which will curb my food cravings and make it much easier to stick to our plan.

I am aware that I still have not posted about exercise but there will finally be one once I have managed to get into a good and sustained routine. Watch this space…

---